Jennifer Burns
speaker
543 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 2 Feb
Jennifer Burns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.
Appearances
He does a really interesting interview at the end of his life where he's beginning to voice some doubts about globalization. which was, he was sort of a prophet of globalization, a cheerleader of globalization. He really thought it would lead to a better world in all respects.
And towards the end of his life, it's about two years before he dies, there's a note of doubt about how globalization unfolded and what it would mean, particularly for the American worker. And so you can see him still thinking, and that to me, I had sort of assumed he became crankier and crankier and more and more set in his ways.
And of course, there's a phase where he does become that way, especially if he's in the public eye and there's not room for nuance. But to find in the last years of his life him being so reflective, that was absolutely not something Rand could do.
I am a historian of ideas, yes.
Yeah, and of kind of pushing back against that movement towards communism, social democracy. But one difference that I really should emphasize is Rand is a writer of fiction. She's a philosopher, but she's also a writer of fiction. So she is working almost in the mythic register, much more in the psychological register.
She's creating characters that people identify with and people relate to experiences they've had. And that's one of the reasons she hits so deep. And she's also offering people, you know, I read all the fan letters to her. People would say things like, I read The Fountainhead and now I'm getting a divorce. You know, having just these incredible realizations.
Milton Friedman didn't get such things. Or, you know, I'll meet someone and they'll say to me, you know, Ayn Rand is the reason I went to medical school. You know, like a woman said this to me a few years back. It never even occurred to me that I could be a doctor until I read Ayn Rand. And I said, I'm going to go to medical school. And so she has that really intense impact on people.
So she thought of herself as rational. She thought of rationality as... kind of what she was doing, but she was actually doing a kind of mytho-poetic psychological work as well. Whereas Friedman, on the one hand, was much more rational, and there's a whole set of economic thinking, and he provides a rational framework for understanding the world, and it's the framework of neoclassical economics.
At the same time, he does pull on mythologies of the idea of America in the Gilded Age, the frontier mythology, the individual immigrant, the settler mythology. He pulls on these, but he doesn't create them. He's more kind of playing a tune he already has.
Whereas I think Rand really does something a little bit deeper in her ability to reach into people's psyche and then take that emotional, psychological experience and fuse it to an intellectual world and a political world. And that's really what makes her so powerful. And so I think she comes back in emotionally.
to relevancy in a different way than Friedman does because I think in some way she's tapped into a kind of more universal human longing for independence and autonomy and kind of self-creation and self-discovery.
Yeah, sure. And that's a great summary. You learn fast. So let me start with the economics and then I can kind of transition to how he used those economic ideas to become a real voice in the American conservative movement, in the American political realm. So I'll kind of highlight four ideas or contributions or episodes.
One was his work with Anna Schwartz in revising our understanding of the Great Depression. And that's tightly related to the second, which is the school of monetarism that he and Schwartz really become founders of. Then there is the prediction of stagflation and the explanation of that in the 1970s, which really is one of these sort of career-making predictions.
And then in terms of technical economics, he's known for the permanent income hypothesis, which he develops with a group of female collaborators that I can talk about. So those are kind of four technical pieces and being really brought together in what becomes the Chicago School of Economics. He's undoubtedly the head and the leader of the Chicago School of Economics.
There's an earlier generation that he learns from. There's his generation. There's also a Chicago School of Law and Economics that's really profoundly influential. And then there'll be kind of a third generation that he's somewhat distinct from, but that goes on to really shape economics. But let me go back to these kind of four pieces and let me start with Great Depression. So
Milton Friedman actually lives through the Great Depression. He's in college when it hits, and he is—so he's in college, it's 1928 to 1932, and he's aware of the Depression, and he's deciding, should I study mathematics or should I study economics? And he's had some good economics teachers, but it's really the context. It's looking around at the slow dissolving of economic prosperity.
So he decides to go to Chicago. He decides to study economics. And what's really interesting is that The Great Depression is so unexpected. It's unpredicted. It's unprecedented. And economists are really struggling to know how to respond to it. And so he's going to arrive at the University of Chicago when the field is struggling to know what to do.
So he's in this kind of really open space where the institutional economics of the 1920s has failed to predict, which was focused on business cycles. This is the irony. Their big thing was charting and understanding business cycles. And then we have the biggest business cycle of all time and they haven't seen it coming and they don't have a good explanation for it.
And what he will get at Chicago is, is the remnants of a monetary understanding of the economy. And so his teachers, they don't know exactly what's going on, but they look first to the banking crisis. They look first to the, in 1933, it's, you know, bank runs, failures of, maybe it's up to a third of American banks. It's huge. Thousands of banks are failing per week. So they're focused on that.
So that's the first kind of imprint he will have. The Great Depression has something to do with a The second imprint he will have is that all of his professors are profoundly concerned about the social crisis. They want relief programs. They want them now. They want bank regulation and financial reform. They're very active. This is not laissez-faire by any stretch of the imagination.
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